Book reviews

Labelled a Black Villain: and Understanding the Social Deprivation Mindset. By Trevor Hercules. Reviewer: Rod Earle

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Last Updated: Wednesday, 02 September 2020 13:46

Published: Sunday, 14 June 2020 19:06

Written by Rod Earle

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Labelled a Black Villain: and Understanding the Social Deprivation Mindset. By Trevor Hercules, (Waterside Press, 232 pp.)  ISBN 9781909976696, £19.95.

For much of the first decade of the 21^st century, people working in criminal justice were encouraged to take an ‘evidence-based’ approach. Heavily pushed in New Labour's reforms of the youth justice system, its fortunes have declined as evidence-based practice produced evidence of unintended consequences. These included vast numbers of young people being sucked into an increasingly muscular and punitive youth justice system. Many of them ended up locked up. Too many of them were black.

In the political confusion that followed the deflation of New Labour’s neo-liberal project (precipitated by the 2007/8 banking crisis) the focus on ‘What Works’ has been replaced by something closer to an indifferent ‘What Ever’. The political instincts of Conservatism that replaced New Labour have never been propelled by an interest in evidence and into the gaps vacated by the collapse of faith in evidence-based practice has strolled ‘experience-based practice’. Trevor Hercules is an advocate of this and his experiences couldn’t be more vital even if there is little compelling evidence that they can do more than provide him with a means of making a valuable contribution to society by helping some young people avoid the worst that society can throw at them. And there’s no harm in that. 

Trevor’s book offers rich insights into prison life, police practice and black lives when that really matters. As the police killing of George Floyd and other events in the USA rekindle radical anti-racist activism, his account of doing seven years and more in prison during the 1970s and 1990s when police racism was as routine as it was widely denied, is invaluable. As vivid and disturbing as his first-hand account is, it is made all the more compelling by his assertion at the beginning of the book that “Prisons in Britain are far worse places than they were when I was there”. 

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The Death of the Gods: the New Global Power Grab. By Carl Miller. Reviewer: Blazej Kaucz

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Last Updated: Wednesday, 02 September 2020 13:42

Published: Thursday, 05 December 2019 17:25

Written by Colin Sumner

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The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab by Carl Miller (William Heinemann, UK, 2018), 400pp. ISBN: 978-1785151330 (hbk). $13

The world is changing, no doubt. Would you like to know how some of the elements of our contemporary world are evolving? I would encourage you to read The Death of the Gods by Carl Miller to find out more about these changes. Carl Miller demonstrates how some of the elements of our contemporary world are shifting, and this book traces a historically embedded sequence of changes in power, including its latest phase.

More specifically, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, public opinion pays more attention to how Internet activity is affecting our daily and political realities. Both sociologists and the public should be getting more attuned to what is going on in that space. Thus, one way of doing that is by reading Carl Miller's The Death of the Gods. Cyberattacks during election times might affect a political landscape, so it would be good for social scientists to understand more how critical these issues are to democracies. This book is a timely reminder of how some of the changes in the power structure affect all of us, even though most examples and situations discussed in this book relate to the developed countries. 

The Death of the Gods highlights how centres of power are shifting in contemporary societies of the Global North (and no doubt South too), with emphasis on the unparalleled speed and pace of change. The book is aimed mostly at non-academic audiences, but it offers some basic theoretical grounding about debates on power. It aims to show how some old "gods" (a direct reference to Greek mythology) are losing their power and how new ones are emerging in the early twenty-first century. This book discusses the association between power and modern technology (i.e. computers, all types of computer software, and mobile phones).

Read more: The Death of the Gods: the New Global Power Grab. By Carl Miller. Reviewer: Blazej Kaucz

Human Trafficking, Human Misery. By Alexis Aronowitz. Reviewer: Angela O'Connor

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Last Updated: Wednesday, 27 May 2026 14:39

Published: Tuesday, 26 November 2019 19:47

Written by Angela O'Connor

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Alexis A. Aronowitz  Human Trafficking, Human Misery: The Global Trade in Human Beings (2013). Scarecrow Press: Plymouth, UK. 219pp. €51.77 [h/b], €39.95 [p/b. 

Alexis Aronowitz’ analysis on the global trade in human beings, is a phenomenal piece of literature that gives the reader a broad and informed outlook on the actions and crimes that are carried out in the process of this hideous crime. From the outset, this book gives the reader a thorough understanding of the egregious crime of human trafficking and the many different violations that are associated with this trade such as, but not limited to, slavery, sexual exploitation and child labour. It brings to the forefront a crime that is slowly but surely, garnering public attention, in addition to countless initiatives being set up by NGO’s and government departments (e.g. UN.GIFT –  the Global Initiative to Fighting Human Trafficking and the annual Trafficking in Persons Report that has been composed by the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking in Persons).

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Criminology goes to the Movies. Nicole Rafter. Reviewer: Steve Hall

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Last Updated: Wednesday, 02 September 2020 13:43

Published: Sunday, 12 July 2015 12:00

Written by Steve Hall

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Rafter, N. & Brown, M. (2011) Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime, Theory and Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press. 227 pp.

In this book Rafter and Brown rise to the challenge of making criminological theory accessible, interesting and relevant by taking it to the movies. For a long time now, cinema has been residing at the heart popular culture, representing the world and exerting a heavy influence on the construction of meaning. This immediately strikes the reader as a bright idea for enhancing the often difficult task of teaching criminological theory, but, via the medium of cinema, it also complements cultural criminology’s traditional mode of thinking by bringing popular culture into criminology and setting it up as a field of study.  What makes the book interesting is, firstly, the crossover between the traditional practice of bringing the movies into criminology and the more original attempt to take criminological theory to the movies, and, secondly, the emphasis it places on the fact that ‘out there’ in popular culture itself is an ongoing form of informal criminological theorizing expedited by the relationship between various movies and their audiences.

Read more: Criminology goes to the Movies. Nicole Rafter. Reviewer: Steve Hall